Movement Poetry Exploration (Mrs. Clark)

Over the past few weeks, the Kindergarten classes have been involved in a movement poetry exploration. We began our exploration by reading the poem "I Have A Dream" from the book "Healing Thourgh Art" by Zoey Wood-Salomon. The following are the words to the poem.

I am only a child

but I see the beauty 

in the early winter morn

and the freshly

fallen snow

I am only a child

but I see the beauty

in all of nature

as it reaches out 

and touches me

I am only a child

but you see

I have a dream

and someday

someday…

You'll see

To start our exploration we read through the poem a few times and talked about what the students noticed, what they thought and finally what they wondered about. One of the students summed it up perfectly; "I think it is about how even though we are little people we can make a difference and one day when we are big other people will see"  

Once we had this idea, we put the poem on the shelf and came up with the best way to represent the poem.  I wrote a simple melody to go along with the feelings the students described they had when we read the poem. From here we started to explore.  We began with four different apparatus: the small hand hoop, a wrist scarf, a square scarf and a large sail.  With each of these items we explored how to move with them and then how it fit to our poem.  

After we explored all four items we were on to the final step.  We had a class discussion on what we thought worked and didn't work for each of the items and then took a class vote.  What you see in the pictures is how the kids  felt their movements best connected to the words in the poem. 

The final touch was to move as a group while still moving as an individual. Before this exploration, we had been emphasizing feeling musical sentences and using our levels.  It was great to see these things come out through their ideas as well as being expressed in their bodies!  

This whole project was student exploration based and I am so proud of how well they did with such a big endeavour!

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